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The Dilemma Males Face in the Era of Political Correctness

Mon, 6 Sep 2010 11:30:37 -0500

Everywhere one turns, nowadays, the current ‘politically correct’ gender message is that “men are the problem”. In articles in newsstand publications, in professional journals, in cartoons in the daily newspaper, on greeting cards, at diversity conferences - everywhere one looks and listens, males are viewed as “the Problem that Can’t Be Solved”. After thousands of years of a patriarchal society looking down its nose at females and people from non-majority racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation groups, in the last 40 years the culture has taken an about-face and pointed the finger at “males” as ‘everyone else’s problem child’. We have been witness to a cultural shift that has replaced misogyny with misandry.

Now, let me be clear about my perspective as an executive director of a nonprofit on men’s emotional wellness: I am not saying that men don’t have problems. Far from it: males [at least, white heterosexual males] still control most of the levers of political power in the society at-large. Males, generally, continue to control the destiny of families (at least families where a male provider is present) - and, even when the family involved is not their own, believe they have the right to direct the social rights of families; such control is sometimes felt as being oppressive by women and children. Men constitute the majority of prison populations, have a much higher incidence of alcohol and illicit drug use than females, are responsible for most of the physical assaults on women and other men, and do most of the killing, both on the streets in urban settings and on the battlefield.

In addition to managing a nonprofit, I’m an antiracism trainer for the Anti-Defamation League’s A World of Difference program. The perspective of that program is that white heterosexual males ‘sit at the top of the power and privilege scale’ and oppress pretty much everyone one else. And largely I’m in agreement with this line of thinking; white males in particular do indeed have a massive reservoir of unearned cultural entitlements. [For more on this, read Peggy McIntosh’s essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.] As a white heterosexual male, I’ve become, from my training and education, very much aware of the racial and sexual privilege that I possess, whether I deserve it or not.

The other ‘problem’, though, is that by viewing “men as the problem”, the society fails to consider that men have their own issues [not just that they are a problem for other groups]. And labeling males [and especially white heterosexual males] “as a problem”, that females, transgender persons, and non-white groups can laugh about or discount, fails to work in the direction of solving any of those deep-seated emotional issues. Additionally, the more males are laughed at or treated as the butt of everyone else’s ridicule, the more they become defensive and entrench themselves in the very dysfunctional behaviors that others want them to face [and which they need to face, if they are to be of benefit to themselves, their intimate partners, their families, or the larger society].

Males aren’t ‘organically’ or ‘genetically’ predisposed to dysfunctional behaviors. The primary obstacle to their achieving positive mental health is the cultural socialization that the patriarchal society gives males [what John Stoltenberg, in The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience, terms the ‘manhood construct’]. And should we forget, we are all - males, females, and transgender persons - products of that patriarchal system and both beneficiaries and victims of it. One cannot be raised in a patriarchal system without ‘buying into’ the system, if only at an unconscious level [which may be in direct contradiction to one’s conscious desire to move beyond or out of it], much in the same way that one can’t be raised in a racist or sexist system without having a difficult time overcoming those in-bred racist or sexist ideas about the world around oneself, no matter how much one works, consciously, to dispense with those internalized messages.

From my perspective, men’s emotional wellness is the ‘path to a solution’ to these self-defeating behaviors. Instead of shaming males for their behaviors [which any competent mental health professional knows is counter-productive and simply drives the dysfunctional behaviors deeper into ones psyche], men’s emotional wellness teaches males how to move beyond the patriarchal socialization and into a world whereby they assist in the creation of a society where equality is the password. Men needn’t be the ‘oppressor’, as long as they realize that ‘the oppression of any one of us oppresses all of us’. This is a complex issue, and this week’s blog is only a starting point for that discussion, with many more postings to follow, in an effort to elucidate and educate others about issues faced by males and the ‘solution orientation’ of men’s emotional wellness.

Male Rape Skit on Saturday Night Live, Aired on August 28, 2010

Sat, 4 Sep 2010 23:26:13 -0500

On the evening of August 28, Saturday Night Live aired a program which included a skit that portrayed male rape in prison as "humorous". The segment included a couple of actors who were supposedly "scaring some kids straight" with talk about "what it's like to be in a prison". They described, in rather graphic detail, aspects of male rape in prison settings as, supposedly, a way to "show the kids why not to break the law". Throughout the segment, as is common on SNL, there was a continuous 'laugh track'.

Least anyone forget, rape is a crime. Shall I repeat this: RAPE IS A CRIME. Whether a woman or man is raped, it is a violation of their legal rights as a citizen. Few people doubt that violent sexual penetration of females, by males (and sometimes other females) is a criminal act and should not be condoned. But, apparently, in the minds of the script writers at SNL, violent and unwanted sexual penetration of males, especially in a prison setting, is "humorous" and should be laughed at.

I find this bizarre, in the extreme. As an article that I read a couple of years ago, by a man who had been repeatedly raped in prison, noted "When the judge sentenced me, he didn't say 'you are hereby sentenced to 10 years in prison and are to be subjected to repeated violent sexual penetration, with the government representatives and/or guards providing you no protection nor legal recourse'. He only sentenced me to prison." Yet, male rape in prisons is an all too common occurrence in the "criminal justice system". And many in the society seem to treat it like "oh, that's just the way it is and nothing can be done about it".

This is simply intolerable. We have a greatly increased awareness in this culture about the horrendous reality of female sexual violation, and an increased willingness to prosecute such crimes. Yet violent sexual penetration of males, either in terms of cultural awareness of its occurrence (by family members, members of the clergy, intimate partners, and/or in prison) or willingness to see it as an intolerable crime to stop and prosecute, lags far behind. Sexual child abuse is far too common in our culture, and frankly that of male children doesn't lag too far behind statistics for female children - one in 5 girls, one in 7 boys (and that is only the latest figures). A number of studies have pointed out that around 70% of males in prison were themselves sexually abused as children. These are statistics, and facts, that our society continues to allow itself to be in denial about.

Violent sexual penetration, of males, by males (or female 'caregivers'), either as children or as adults, IS A CRIME, and should be treated as such. That males who serve time in prison (or 'justice systems', as they are commonly referred to) do not receive adequate protection from the prison system - and thereby do not have access to 'justice' within that system - is not something that this society can continue to ignore, and definitely not something it should crack jokes about or find humorous. Least we forget, people who serve their time in prison systems eventually are released. The trauma of prison itself is profound enough, without having the emotional trauma of sexual rape added to it.

Just in case SNL writers forgot, wealthy males don't usually end up in such settings, and that applies to network executives. Show some dignity for the real world of male experience; don't portray violent criminal sexual penetration of men as 'funny'. There's nothing funny about it. Any woman can tell you that.

“Reform Politics” As Cover For Illegal Political Manipulations

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 10:36:56 -0500

I’ve been ruminating about the illegal campaign financing charge against Sen. Jeff Smith [Missouri General Assembly] for the past several weeks, and want to speak about his behavior from the perspective of men’s wellness, which is my professional interest. It’s sort of ‘old news’ (given how quickly the media focus of events changes), yet the latest corruption charges against a third Missouri legislator last Friday make it current.

Let me emphasize, from the outset, that this is not a partisan criticism. In addition to managing a nonprofit focused on men’s emotional wellness, I am as a private citizen a veteran of 60+ Democratic Party campaigns since 1978 and, regardless of my personal sadness about how this case has played out, have been and fully plan to remain a thoroughly devoted liberal activist. Further, it is not partisan because political corruption hardly has a solely one-party face; both of the major political parties have plenty of history related to such behavior throughout American history.

But what makes this case so relevant to me, and to men’s wellness, is that Sen. Smith presented the public face of a liberal, activist, reform politician, who was not selling out to “the powers to be”, who was going to change the rules of the game to favor the common citizen. The enthusiasm for his reform campaign was so strong that a local director made a movie about him, “Can Mr. Smith Go To Washington?”, supporting his maverick approach. I saw that movie and was cheering for him along with many other liberal activists. And yet, even as he ran for office in 2004 against Russ Carnahan, even as progressive voters responded to his message of reform with enthusiasm and energy, even as he gained activist support for his underfunded, grassroots candidacy against the family dynasty candidate, who in the eyes of the political establishment was the assumed winner of the contest [a la David vs. Goliath], Jeff Smith was financing, with campaign funds, an underhanded, illegal smear campaign against his opponent and then knowingly lying to federal election officials about his behavior.

What is important to note here is that this behavior by Sen. Smith wasn’t a case of a reform candidate who started out with a fresh record and then, after years in the rough and tumble of electoral politics, was slowly corrupted by that system. We are talking about a politician who while he was running for office his first time around knowingly engaged in illegal electoral financing, while representing himself to his supporters as a fresh face who was fighting for the common citizen and against the corrupt system. And who then continued to cover-up that illegal behavior - and encouraged others to join him in the cover-up - right up to the time of his arrest, while at the same time continuing to promote his image of being a reform legislator.

It is the emotional disconnect between his public face and his private behavior, and what appears to be his denial, to himself, about the contradiction manifested by this behavior, that is so thoroughly disturbing.

None of us is ‘perfect’, nor should anyone expect perfection in our political leaders. Good representation, an honest approach to the democratic system, keeping ones hand out of the till - yes, those are reasonable expectations - but not perfection. But the larger dynamic that I am addressing here is the self-delusion, by some males, between what they say they believe in [their stated ideals] and how they behave in their lives [especially their unconscious willingness to fail to notice that dissonance] .

Hence, Sen. Smith’s statements, upon resigning, that he had done a lot of good for citizens of Missouri and had assisted many downtrodden groups to gain needed resources, as though gaining political office by whatever means, including violating federal election laws, was outweighed by “good works” once in office. Apparently he failed to notice the obvious contradiction between acting in an illegal manner in order to gain political office and what one does in the office. And yet what one does in order to get what one goes after, i.e. ‘the process’, is critical to what one gains in the end. They work hand-in-hand. Using illegal means to be able to do “good works” does not justify the illegal behavior. Quite to the contrary: stating that one is a reform candidate who is challenging the perceived inequity of the system even while actively participating in the very corruption that you say you are working against destroys the hopes and dreams and rational expectations of voters who hope and pray that you’re somehow ‘different’ from the norm. The voters did not set Jeff Smith up to a ‘higher standard’; he did that himself and then failed to meet even a minimal standard of acceptable political behavior.

Knowing that no one is perfect and that ‘the system’ itself has inherent problems, the best lesson that can come out of this whole process is if Jeff Smith could analyze the ‘dynamic’ behind his behavior and figure out why he could ‘not notice’ the incredible pain he has caused many politically progressive people who fervently believed in him and who truly believed he was a reform politician. He could, after serving his time in prison (or whatever penalty he incurs), give talks to young people entering the political realm on how to “look inside one’s soul” and notice such emotional disconnects and how to avoid those pitfalls in the political system. We, as citizens, don’t expect purity nor do we expect someone never to make a mistake, but we do expect lessons to be learned and better behavior to be manifested in the future. In psychotherapy, we often encourage clients with the phrase “progress not perfection” and note that that is an excellent goal to pursue; we should expect nothing less from our political leaders.

On Return from the High School Reunion: Reflections

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:14:36 -0500

It turns out that all the fear, anxiety, and nervousness that I expected to ‘arise’ during my return trip to Wichita & Derby, Kansas didn’t come to be. It wasn’t that I avoided the anxiety - I actually actively sought it out, to re-experience and revision the energy, by driving by the McConnell Air Force Base housing where I lived when the torture and terror was inflicted by my insane father. But while the memories came back, being there and seeing the general area of the torture didn’t evoke the flood of painful memories that I assumed it would.

And, truly, that came as a surprise.

It’s not as though the outcome to the terror doesn't continue to insert traumatic effects on my life - I’m still quite paranoid about the world generally and I have a decidedly unpleasant discomfort when anyone even playfully hits me, and I continue to be quite unnerved when anyone angrily raises their voice at me, for almost any reason, fearing (or the inner child fears) that I will be struck in the next moment.

But, as my therapist pointed up when we had our Kansas visit follow-up session, it’s as though the energy around the torture has been ‘bleed off’ in the intervening years. It’s like I had a clear memory of the torture and the trauma it invoked in my life, but in the intervening years, I’ve spent so much energy and invested so much work into working through the trauma that the “impact” of the actual events have dissipated. As my therapist observed. it was like I had carefully tried to contain the terror memories in a “strong box”, that was then locked and placed in a lead-lined container, and then I tried to slowly withdraw portions, as I felt emotionally healthy enough to do so. However, unbeknownst to me, minute holes had developed in the box, and slowly the traumatic terror “bleed” through those holes, out the bottom of the container and out of my emotional world. Such that, when I went to open the box, in the present - during this visit to the place of the torture, the impact of the event was gone. Literally gone.

Now, much of it had already gone during the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s, when I had gone through a most traumatic “emotional breakthrough” (as my therapist at the time speculated it was, rather than a ‘breakdown’). About 3 years of almost nonstop panic anxiety, followed by many years of less traumatic, though no less painful, working though the fear and PTSD. And it turns out - or so it appears presently, anyway - that that very hard, very painful, but ultimately productive emotional work dissipated much of the ‘traumatic torture energy’ contained in that “Wichita, Kansas Strongbox”.

The other part, somewhat amusingly, was that when I went to the actual reunion and saw my fellow classmates - and how much we had all aged and changed - it fully hit me, in a way that simply ‘thinking about it’ could never have done: that 40 years have past, that the events occurred 40 years ago, and that I’ve grown - and aged - as a person in the meantime. That may be somewhat of a “duh, of course” experience objectively, but for me, anyway, it took actually ‘being in the place’ that I had spent 39 years fearing returning to to know that that was true. Something about “being there” that changed the whole experience and its effects.

I truly had the chance to revision the event and revision the place. Derby has changed (I never really knew much about the town, since as military kids we were bused to the school, did our high school thing, and were bused back to the base housing). Driving around the town was like visiting a whole new town I’d never really known about. And seeing some of the people I have tangentially known in the high school, who are now adults, was a most pleasing experience. Many of them have matured and grown in ways that are most pleasant and engaging.

Mary S., one of the “court girls” (who was a member of the ‘sports royalty’ in high school), who was a fine and reasonable girl in high school and remains equally so as an adult woman, made a comment which truly brought joyous tears to my eyes. She and I and some other people were talking on the verandah of the Kansas Aviation Museum - where the Saturday night dinner activities were being held. I was laughing that in high school, I was sort of a ‘geeky kid’, who viewed the “court girls” with awe, so entranced was I with their beauty. Mary laughed bemusedly at my comment and said in return “let me assure you, Donald, that we girls felt pretty geeky ourselves”. Then, upon my noting, somewhat painfully, that as a military brat I had never had the experience of “hometown-ness” that the local kids had the chance to experience, Mary reflectively said “I hear what you’re saying, Donald, but the other side is that the military kids brought a worldliness to us, because they had had an experience that challenged our somewhat narrow, parochial view of the world born by only having the experience of growing up in one place”.

I nearly cried when she said that: I had, as a military kid, felt my whole life like an outsider, like no one in any of the communities where I lived ever accepted me as ‘one of the group’, because I wasn’t from that community. But Mary’s comment put the whole of that pain in a completely different - and ultimately enlightening - context. It’s true that none of us can experience the whole of every kind of human experience - our lives are just too limited - but each of us can have different experiences that we can then share and then enliven the lives of others.

All in all, a great experience visiting Derby, Wichita, and the high school reunion. And, as is often the case, it evoked realizations that I could never had known about before traveling there. I’m glad I took the time to make the excursion. It put to rest a long-harbored fear. And it allows me to invest that “emotional working-through energy” into other equally traumatic areas of my life experience. Who knows, maybe I’ll realize that other fears have ‘bled off ‘ more PTSD anxiety than I have previous suspected.

The Gift of Choice

Mon, 11 May 2009 23:10:33 -0500

The first and greatest gift the men’s wellness movement gave me, early in my involvement, was the knowledge that I did in fact, after all the terror I had experienced as a child, have a choice in how I approached sex.

Having grown up in an intense crazy-making environment where the secret police (my parents) watched my every move for a chance to charge me with a crime so that they could hold a kangaroo court, convict me on the flimsiest of evidence, and carry out the sentence as quickly as could occur, I lived in the fear and paranoia that behavior which the day before had been acceptable could, the following day - hell, even the following hour - be deemed unacceptable and subject to torture. Further, due to the incest that was perpetrated upon me, I grew to see myself as having value only as a sex object, as only having value - and being given a faded version of love - when I was performing sexually to satisfy the desires of others. Hence, upon reaching adulthood (age-wise, if not emotionally), when I encountered females and they desired sex, I thought that I had no choice but to satisfy their desires, whether or not I had any personal desire for the sexual involvement - that in fact it was my ‘job’ to satisfy them sexually.

‘Manhood’ messages that were hardly unique to me

Now, I must note that I was also a product of “male culture”. In male culture, when a woman offers to have sex with a man, it isn’t really an ‘offer’ at all, but rather a command performance. The politics of sexuality in America, male-to-female, is that since women control the turnstile of allowance for sex (except in the case of forced sex, as in rape, or in some marriages, where the husband demands sex at the price of economic support), if a woman offers to have sex with a man, he thinks he has to accept the offer or else the offer may never be made again. It’s true that a lot of men walk around in a more or less perpetual state of horniness, and are much more visually-oriented than women [though women friends tell me they discreetly ‘check-out’ men’s bodies also, just less obviously than men check women’s bodies], often thinking how they’d like to have sex with almost any female who grabs their attention. But no matter how much they may desire to have sex with a female, it is ultimately the woman who decides if the sex is going to occur. In American sexual politics, anyway (and it may be true elsewhere, but I’m primarily aware of my own culture) there are an overabundance of penises and a great shortage of vaginas - in much the same way that men can produce millions of sperm in each ejaculate and women can only release one egg a month.

So, it wasn’t just that I had this incest demand that hung over my head; I was also raised in a culture that said that if a woman offered to have sex with a man, he had best say yes, or else be ‘suspect’, with the supposition being that he was gay or in some other way couldn’t ‘get it up’ for women. Further, males in this culture are socialized to not know what they feel - in fact, to not feel because feelings themselves are ‘suspect’. Hence, for many men, being in touch with their own sexuality and the feelings that they have concerning such a sexual offer is a serious leap of understanding that most men have a difficult time manifesting.

The results of combining both the ‘manhood’ and incest demands

But when that ‘cultural demand’ is combined with an ‘incest demand’, what results is not simply that I, as a man, should act on a woman’s offer of sex, but further that, as an incest survivor, it was my ‘job’ to satisfy a woman sexually, without much regard for my own pleasure. The ‘incest demand’ was both that I ‘shouldn’t’ be concerned about my own pleasure, nor that I should expect that my female partner will be concerned about it. And the result for me, until very recently in my life, was that I kept meeting one woman after another, like clockwork, who cared little about satisfying me sexually, but who acted like it was their god-given right to be satisfied sexually.

And this extended to all aspects of the interaction. It was my sole ‘job’ to approach them for a date; it was my sole ‘job’ to wine and dine them with little seductive effort on their part in return; it was my sole ‘job’ to ‘perform’ sex on them with little expectation of receiving sexual stimulation or even caressing in return. I have rarely ever had the experience of a female partner spending more than a few short minutes on ‘sexual play’ with any part of my body, but with intense stated demands that I ‘engage in sexual play with them’ for the purpose of getting them excited and lubricating. Which was always quite paradoxical: many women would ‘say’ that foreplay shouldn’t be solely focused on sex (that it should be ‘play’ in a more all-encompassing way) and then not engage in play with me that allowed me to be mutually pleasured in the interaction. In other words, the ‘play’ was not mutual at all; it was solely and completely about getting them turned on and coming to orgasm. If I experienced pleasure, that would be great, but their pleasure alone was their primary focus and their primary expectation about the interaction.

Hence, what the men’s wellness movement taught me was that I had the right to have control over my own sexuality and that I could say no to sex when it was clearly not in my best interests to have sex with a particular female [when she was inappropriate for me, or clearly only wanted to use me for her sexual pleasure, without any interest whatever in engaging in mutual satisfaction; or when I, having checked in with my own feelings - I had learned to have such feelings and to respect them - realized I didn’t have the desire, or comfort, or safety to continue the sexual interaction]. I truly did not know that before I learned it in the men’s movement.

In 1993, at the New Mexico Men’s Wellness Conference, that was held annually in Abiqui, NM, I and three other men taught a course on intimacy and sexuality in male-female relationships and how men’s emotional wellness factored into such an interaction. For my part in the course, I presented a subsection on the sexual abuse of men by women. When I first began my talk, most of the men, though listening respectfully, were looking a bit askance, due to the nontraditional perspective of the subject. But by the time I finished telling my story [about being treated, in many ‘intimate’ situations, as a sexual object and a sexual machine, with little regard for my feelings and less concern for my mutual safety or comfort] there was a general acknowledgement that it was both valid to me and valid for a least some other males. Several men at the conference approached me afterward, noting privately that they had also been sexually abused by women [given the definition I had proposed] but that because “men aren’t supposed to be victims” in American culture, they had had a difficult time coming to grips with the abuse - or admitting to themselves that such abuse had occurred. The next day, I facilitated a ‘lawn-workshop’ on the subject, which was attended by six other men.

It has been rare to manifest a truly ‘equitable’ sexual interaction with a woman

Even in recent years, in relationships which have been generally better than most that I’ve ever had in my life, the balance concerning mutual sexual pleasure continues to be heavily skewed toward the pleasure of the female.

However, there are other reasons that intimate heterosexual relationships can be satisfying. My desire is to find a partner who will ‘make love to me’ in return, who is a very loving person on an emotional level, with whom I have many interests in common, and whom I feel ‘safe’ around, knowing that she’s going to be truthful with me and that I can trust what she says. {After a terrifying childhood of being regularly lied to, that would be such a relief!] That such a female partner could love me without much qualification or excessive demands, sexually or financially, would be truly a blessing and to be greatly respected.

While I have the choice about whether I involve myself in an intimate physical relationship with a particular female, what I don’t have choice about is whether the sex play will be mutual. That’s about my partner’s choices. And while my experience, almost across-the-board, has been that few women want an equitable partner in the bedroom [most seem to want a man who makes love to them, while I want a partner who makes love with me], I can focus my energy on gaining emotional satisfaction, and that’s a wonderful advancement over past relationships.

That I can’t have everything I want, that the sexual play is rarely completely equal or mutual - well, I’ve learned that life isn’t a quid pro quo equation, that what I do for my intimate partners isn’t likely to be returned in the same way as it is offered, that often the balance is achieved by each partner doing what they are best at, or motivated by, and if that’s sufficient to keep the warm loving feelings alive, that’s the best it going to be.

And I’m learning to accept that that’s enough. I have the choice to stay around, I have the choice to accept or reject such a limitation, I have the choice to engage in the intimate relationship, as well as the choice concerning with whom I have such intimacy, and I have a choice about how much sexual energy I put into it. And those are gifts of choice that I didn’t know I had until I learned them in the men’s movement.